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What I'll be doing Monday Night

8.1.08

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Not a blog entry, a press release.

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Science failing to find correlations between social media use and affective polarisation

There is this weirdly dominant narrative that social media drives political polarisation. It's not just that I have another good, published explanation for polarisation (Science Advances) – (polarisation is correlated with economic precarity, and we now have data indicating it may be caused by it as well . Basically, trust is a luxury good, you deploy it when you are not at great risk .) But also, I am really worried about the constant scapegoating of what may actually be a useful technology , and it may be confusing the real problems of social media manipulation and disinformation (see comments about that). Note 1: this is a perpetually under-construction blog post (in the old times it would be a Web page). The most interesting, recent articles are actually at the bottom. Note 2: Axel Bruns has an entire book ( and several papers and chapters ) with more extensive reviews coming to the same conclusion. Once I found Burns' work, I basically gave up adding more articles here

OpenAI reveals the anti-regulatory intent of its regulatory disinformation

Sam Altman is speaking in Munich today. Yesterday in the process of switching his misdirection about AI from impossible scenarios (AGI) to the one we're already solving (superintelligence) , he fully revealed his anti-regulatory, anti-government agenda. While asking governments to help him and his backers maintain a cornering of the NLP generative AI market [1], he ( and two coauthors ) also said: We think it’s important to allow companies and open-source projects to develop models below a significant capability threshold, without the kind of regulation we describe here (including burdensome mechanisms like licenses or audits).[2] In other words, the authors are saying: AI and software are not a product (follows from 2: no need for audits, proving due diligence, professionalism of employees), do not inspect whether our companies are following basic business standards of following and documenting good practice (2: no audits), do not ensure we are hiring qualified staff, educated a

2024 BRIEF overview on LLM / "foundation models" / 2023's version of "AI"

History: In 2023, the EU was consolidating its legislation called "The AI Act" (or AI Regulation.) Despite the fact that this is a fairly boring piece of legislation just ensuring that at least some digital products (the ones that may automatically alter human lives) are subject to proper product law , there was a massive amount of lobbying and misinformation. Part of all that was to misdirection pretending that the only "real" AI was the newest stuff on the block – large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT, which produce fluent and occasionally accurate verbal output, and related technologies producing sounds and images. Provenance / Cost: While "generative AI" (models that can both interpret data, and produce data similar to what they can interpret) have been around since at least the 1990s, the largest of the large models are in the USA, produced by a small number of companies at really enormous, vast, expense. Expense of these largest models is in t

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